[SPOILER] Krill rambles on

[Krill]

Tier 4 is the final tier that I’m willing to write about; the players I’ve not listed I either don’t know or don’t have much good to say regarding them. All the players in this list I view as weak, and I would be reasonably happy with them as neighbours. They make continued poor decisions that are reasonably easy to take advantage of, are slow and not particularly skilled at waging war.

Tier 4: Donovan Zoi, Stalin (AGG/IND) of Zulu

Donovan is actually a veteran of the civ fora, since before the turn of the millennium IIRC. Has experience of demogames, PBEM and various pitboss games. Been around longer than I have, but I know for a fact that he has no experience of ladder games and minimal experience of other MP games, or probably none of era starts. He’s done plenty of succession games, SP etc. He knows the basics of civ, he just isn’t very good at playing games as we do. I have had the pleasure of playing against Donovan briefly in PB25, and he somehow managed to declare war, lose a stack and accept peace in the space of 2-3 turns. Turns out he split stacks, intended to attack at multiple locations on multiple turns. It was like a list of how not to fight a war.

Maybe he’s learnt form that. It would be hard not to, but every war since then has gone badly for him. Maybe he knows how to expand and play the economic game better? Everything I’ve seen from him suggests he is stolid; even with IND, I expect him to be late to wonders, to city sites as he priorities his actions weirdly.

I would very much like to start next to Donovan. Even with Zulu, I doubt he knows how to play out a rush well, and with AGG/IND he can’t expand all that fast. He’s not going to expand any faster than I am, and I don’t even think he is much of a contestant for Henge because he wants to build Ikhanda everywhere for the cheap courthouse effect. This is a big map, so I’m not sure how useful that combination will be. I’d probably try to grab GLH as IND and then over expand, where others probably have to syop expanding at some point due to costs, AGG/Zulu/GLH doesn’t really ever have to stop. I just think Donovan won’t come up with that plan, never mind figure out how to execute it.


yuri: Justinian (SPI/IMP) of Khmer

yuri is like AT: when he plays a game of civ he is just another obstacle. He doesn’t concentrate that much on civ, he has other games (I know he plays in various MtG events around the UK), and that costs him in the larger PB games, because he misses things, making mistakes that he gets punished for. I think if yuri has a good dedlurker, or he were to concentrate on a game then he’d easily be tier 3 or so. I’ll never forget that he played in PB5 and had a really interesting positon that could have won the game, on the same continent as Commoodore that lost first settler to a wolf, and Cyneheard, who consequently got Commodore’d. yuri somehow got eaten by an intercontinental knight rush. I mean...yuri should have been attempting continental hedgemony against two weaker civs yet got eaten entirely, in one war, by the third largest civ on a different continent?

In this game, yuri got IMP/SPI. It’s one of the combinations I don’t like, seeing how you have a really strong early game, and a sound late game, but there is absolutely nothing mid game to help you like cheap buildings, or cheaper great people for tech edge or tactical opportunities. no method of getting out of a tech rut if you over expand, as IMP is wont to do. Yet on a map as lush as this, how hard is it to be to just run cottages everywhere? I’m lowering my valuation of IMP on this map; I tend to find that lusher maps bring up other traits in speed, but IMP just can’t go much faster in expansions because you become constrained by workers and units to defend with, which IMP doesn't help with. I’d rather have AGG than IMP on a map this lush (food poor map like PB1 map, rather have IM though). And how well is yuri, a player that tends to disconnect from games, abuse SPI when he has to constantly evaluate his posiiton in game and plan for hte future, varying turns on a turn by turn basis at times? I don’t think this is a good combination for yuris. The civ is just blah. Sure, 80 hammer aqueduct that you don’t need until late game, but you want earlier for the +1fpt...and still paying full price for basically every building.

I’m not scared of yuri, I’m definitely not scared of this combination regardless of who controls it.

[Krill]

Congratulations HAK on founding Buddhism. May you be next to me so I can make a shrine.

I know it was HAK because only 5 people started with Myst, HAK being one of them, and all the others have discovered techs at turn roll when not logged in. This was HAKs first tech. It follows that HAK went Meditation first on T0 and has just finished it. Others may have popped Myst, but no one popped a tech on T0, so would still be researching Meditation. Gotta be HAK.

[Krill]

I'm praying that there is a 6 yield food resource on either tile 36 or 33 of the scout, in which case I'll settle 999 of Neu Crapital. The roads/worker micro are easy, and that second city fits into so many dot maps it would be reasonably safe.





Because why not post a screenshot of my cities...every turn. I overflowed the research from Fishing into BW, and continued to research BW in case I came across a hut and could pop a first row tech (specifically Hunting). Now, I know the scout is moving 3>32 over the next two turns, ergo I should not pop a hut in those turns and I can't pop Hunting when i'm, half way through researching it. I'll finish BW after Hunting. Tech path is still Hunting>BW>Wheel>Pottery>Myst>AH.

[Krill]

6 players left to play the turn. 18 hours left on the clock.

Turn still won't role for another 15 hours

[Krill]

3 people left and over 16 hours left. Still not rolling as Yuri won't play until tomorrow morning. Or more likely midday as its a bank holiday in the UK.

Bored. I just wanna scout!

[Krill]

Adrien founded Hinduism. HAK grew: couldn't have done that without a workboat start and he had a 3 food or 3 hammer start, and he would have then needed a 6 food tile to grow in 4, eot T7. But demographics showed max food was 7fpt (salt fish or lake crab/clam) so he didn't do that. Did he go warrior/scout first? That's weird. Doubt that was worth it.

Found second city location:




First thoughts are to build something at size 2, or maybe whip a settler at size 3. Get borders to pop and leave it at size 6 working the four hills and two sheep for 16 foodhammers per turn. The corn would help growth to size 6 as well, and can then be handed over to the silver city. I'm going to work the micro out tonight, but I should be able to settle that city T34 rather than T36 for the plains hill site. I think the issues are hooking the sheep that early though. I also need to look at getting the settler out ASAP and whta that looks like, that may work out pretty solid.

[Krill]

Interesting micro for that double sheep city though.

To finish Henge, I need 2 forest chops. One chop can come from one of the original two workers, but ideally I would use a prechopped and roaded forest for the second chop, which is finished by the third worker. That worker is used to generate the overflow for Henge, so only has 1 turn to finish the chop.

Unless I chop the ivory, the fastest road path to the double sheep city will not have any roaded forests, so I'd have to use a convoluted to both hook up the city, and to enable the prechopping of a forest for Henge, most likely roading the path 989 to the double sheep city. Roading by that route also delays settling from T34 to T35, but the largest issue is the flatland sheep pasture. I can't get that hooked up by the turn after founding unless I road the 99 path to the second city and thus that makes teh forests chops harder to achieve.

Looks like there's some micro to work out, because even settling for double sheep, it's only got two 5 yield tiles and no 2 hammer plant. It's not as good as the plains hill city at all, even with the potential quicker founding. It just fits into a greedy dot map better. I may not even use that city site as the second city location, but whatever happens I need to work out the best micro for it.

[DTG]

I wonder whether, despite the oft repeated claim that starting techs matter less in RtR than BtS, Mysticism is the most useful starting tech to begin with in large Pitbosses. At least, assuming it's coupled with one of Hunting or Agriculture. For anyone else, going after Meditation/Polytheism is a waste of beakers, Judaism seems a big risk (unless you have Stone/Marble anyway), and most of the later religions should fall to the Philosophical leaders, as long as they haven't crashed their economies.

[Krill]

I wonder whether, despite the oft repeated claim that starting techs matter less in RtR than BtS, Mysticism is the most useful starting tech to begin with in large Pitbosses. At least, assuming it's coupled with one of Hunting or Agriculture. For anyone else, going after Meditation/Polytheism is a waste of beakers, Judaism seems a big risk (unless you have Stone/Marble anyway), and most of the later religions should fall to the Philosophical leaders, as long as they haven't crashed their economies.

I saw this earlier on my phone, but I wanted to type out the longer reply to properly explain the issues in more depth.

Start techs in base BtS have more value placed upon them because the costs of the techs are so high. Not starting with the right techs was often found to be enough to lose a game. Agriculture and Mining were the two highest value techs; Agri because it enabled AH first starts if you only had pasture resources and it lead to Pottery, enabled farms, and cost more than Hunting. Mining simply because it gave you a head start on BW, chopping and slavery.

If you started with double pasture resources and neither Hunting nor Agri it could take up to 10 more turns to improve starting food compared to players that either started with other food resource types, or had the right techs. Depending on map size, of course. And it isn't just that a player could improve the first resource sooner, it was that the corresponding second, third and fourth etc tiles were improved sooner and the increased output got snowballed. It's why warrior first is never employed anymore.

There are two effects that combined to make this a problem: that pastures are unlocked on a second row tech, and the tech cost increased that comes from increasing the map size increases starting tech costs too much. (Difficulty as well, but almost all games are played on Monarch because those values just work. Difficulty levels change too many variables, which makes balancing MP around the multiple difficulty settings frankly a waste of time).

Moving Pastures to Hunting nerfed agriculture, but the tech costs of Agri was kept high, and Hunting was raised to that level. So essentially I fucked up and reinforced the idea that start techs have value, but spread it around more; you could research any tech whilst going worker first and improve the food resources you have. Come turn 30, people were generally in similar positions depending on the traits that they had...but 2 hammer plants making up most of the difference (that's another discussion though).

The tech cost scaling makes all first row techs the same regardless of map size. This plus the pasture change may be overkill, because the ancient era techs arrive so quickly off the back of the cheap first row techs. The issue with Myst specifically is that even with the correct food tech, you will be slower to BW, AH and Pottery and you can fail to snowball as well off that. Whether the holy city is worth it is one hell of a gamble to take, and if you start with Myst a player has to both go religion first and found the religion for it to have value compared to other techs that have immediately beneficial second row techs afterwards. That said, as it's recoverable if you go for religion and then fail, I don't see any reason to not go for it.

I actually think that removing the starting techs from all civs would probably lead to better game play in terms of increasing meaningful decisions.

[Krill]

Anyone know what timezone TheWannerbe is in?